(CO) Serial rapist sentenced to 868 years in prison 08-31-01 UPDATE
(CO) Serial rapist sentenced to 868 years in prison 08-31-01 UPDATE
Address:http://www.gazette.com/daily/top3.html August 31, 2001
Contact information
Bill Hethcock covers legal affairs and may be reached at 636-0232 or
[email protected]
Judge calls rapist ‘sick,’ quadruples sentence By Bill Hethcock/The
Gazette
A serial rapist convicted of sexually assaulting women older than 50 was
sentenced Thursday to 868 years in prison.
Before imposing the sentence, Fourth Judicial District Judge Theresa
Cisneros called Anthony Peralez, 41, the most dangerous man to pass
through her courtroom.
“You’re a sick man, Mr. Peralez, and I don’t know how you got that way,”
Cisneros said.
“The only thing we can do is protect society from you.”
Peralez was declared a habitual criminal, a legal designation that
allows a judge to quadruple the sentence. He had two prior convictions
for felony marijuana possession and one conviction on possession of
explosives.
The lengthy sentence means Peralez will never be paroled and will spend
the rest of his life in prison, Deputy District Attorney John Newsome
said.
Newsome asked Cisneros for a 977-year sentence, citing the violence of
the crimes and
Peralez’s prior record. Peralez slit one victim’s throat, violently beat
another and sexually assaulted the third for more than six hours, he
said.
“Anthony Peralez will never live by our rules,” Newsome said. “He is a
habitual felon. He has no respect for life, no respect for women’s
bodies, no respect for the law.”
A jury on Aug. 22 found Peralez guilty of 51 charges, including two
rapes against women in Colorado Springs and one rape against a Security
woman.
From September 1999 to September 2000, a masked intruder broke in
through the rear of the women’s homes, beat them, raped them and stole
items.
He forced two of the women to bathe to remove evidence and used a
household cleaning solution on another. All the women lived alone.
Peralez’s youngest victim, a Security woman who was 51 when she was
attacked on Sept. 12, 1999, said she now lives with her mother and
returns to her own house only during daylight.
“He attacked, I defended myself and when he left, he had taken with him
my life that I had built for myself,” she said at Thursday’s sentencing
hearing.
The daughter of the 74-year-old Colorado Springs woman Peralez attacked
on Aug. 6, 2000, said Peralez beat her mother so severely she had to
have holes drilled in her skull to drain cerebral bleeding. But the
emotional toll has been even more difficult to overcome, she said.
“I ask you to not let this man ever walk free again,” she said.
Peralez insisted he is not guilty and said he didn’t get a fair trial.
He said heavy media coverage influenced the case.
He also said his public defenders should have
called expert witnesses to challenge the DNA evidence prosecutors used
to link him to the three rapes.
Cisneros said Peralez got a fair trial and his public defenders did the
best they could in a case in which the facts were stacked against them.
“There is no doubt in my mind that you committed each and every one of
these crimes,” Cisneros said.
Peralez was arrested the night of Nov. 18, when 72-year-old Jean
Zamarripa, who lived alone, fired two bullets into an intruder at her
Knob Hill home.
Police followed a path of parked cars that had been damaged by a car
speeding from her house and found Peralez with bullet wounds in his car.
Lab technicians tested the DNA on one of the bullets at Zamarripa’s
house and matched it to DNA found at the rape scenes.
Zamarripa on Thursday called Nov. 18 the worst night of her life.
“I had no choice but to shoot him,” she said.
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